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Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

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Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#2

Post by austincheney »

> Most interactions are ego-based because people aren’t as self-aware as they could be.

Sad, but I have to agree. Self awareness is something people develop as a natural part of maturity. It is not a skill children have. For example play a board game or card game with children and realize they never know when it’s their turn to play despite watching the game, numerous reminders, and recitation of the rules. They are not self aware. That portion of the brain has not developed yet.

It is frustrating to encounter adults lacking of self awareness where a commonly expected skill of fully functional adulthood is absent. In some cases that can be due to wide spectrum disorders like autism but is more generally due to immaturity, the absence of expected normal development.

Another queue into this is a false expectation of soft skills. That doesn’t mean being soft or kind. Soft skills are perceptual skills associated is active listening and empathy, which sometimes requires being a mean asshole. People with a lack of self awareness tend to have a lot of challenge in this area. They are not the center of the universe, sometimes fail horribly and embarrassingly, and demand harsh unpleasant words. For people lacking of self awareness the harsh reality of corrective communication is likely poorly accepted as they either continue to fail or suffer emotional trauma.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#3

Post by faeriechangling »

austincheney wrote: post #2

> Most interactions are ego-based because people aren’t as self-aware as they could be. Sad, but I have to agree. Self awareness is something people develop as a natural part of maturity. It is not a skill children have. For example play a board game or card game with children and realize they never know when it’s their turn to play despite watching the game, numerous reminders, and recitation of the rules. They are…

Well this was a very pleasant post to read as an autistic person. I can appearantly just have a lack of self awareness completely out of my control and this is embarassing, and demands harsh unpleasant words, even though this approach is likely to fail and inflict emotional trauma on me.

"Empathy" after a social faux pas to me is kind of like a blameless post mortem. Blunt yet unjudgemental with a call to action and some discussion of what went right. Perhaps your words are so likely to fail because because you're taking the wrong approach?

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#4

Post by _y5hn »

faeriechangling wrote: post #3
austincheney wrote: post #2

> Most interactions are ego-based because people aren’t as self-aware as they could be. Sad, but I have to agree. Self awareness is something people develop as a natural part of maturity. It is not a skill children have. For example play a board game or card game with children and realize they never know when it’s their turn to play despite watching the game, numerous reminders, and recitation of the rules. They are…

Well this was a very pleasant post to read as an autistic person. I can appearantly just have a lack of self awareness completely out of my control and this is embarassing, and demands harsh unpleasant words, even though this approach is likely to fail and inflict emotional trauma on me. "Empathy" after a social faux pas to me is kind of like a blameless post mortem. Blunt yet unjudgemental with a call to action and…

This is more directed to those who tend to lead in every social situation.

You might be perceived more favourably than you feel yourself. Try asking people for feedback on your approach.

The environment is infinitely more powerful in most normal cases.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#7

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

I've had some god awful managers in my engineering career and my managerial philosophy is twofold: have empathy and keep coding.

Most, if not all, of my managers over the past 10 years have been people managers cloaked as engineering managers who have all stopped programming a decade ago. So much respect is lost for managers who have turned their back on the very craft that brought them into management.

Before the people manager crowd chimes in with "it's not my job", "we have leads", etc, I want to say that it's about the principle of the matter. I don't care if it's "not your job", on principle you should want to keep your skills sharp in order to fully relate to your supports and, if shit is on fire and you're the only one around, to actually do something and fix the problem instead of completely leaning on your team.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#10

Post by watwut »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #7

I've had some god awful managers in my engineering career and my managerial philosophy is twofold: have empathy and keep coding. Most, if not all, of my managers over the past 10 years have been people managers cloaked as engineering managers who have all stopped programming a decade ago. So much respect is lost for managers who have turned their back on the very craft that brought them into management. Before the pe…

I dont need managers to be coding. I do need them to have technical background and willingness to understand what tech is relevant to them - I had only bad experiences with non-technical managers.

But I really dont understand why they should be coding. Even active developers are not able to fix whatever in any module, you fix only in areas you understand. When shit is on fire, I dont want managers or other random developers to create a bunch on hotfixes that will cause new problems.

I want managers to organize the project in a way that shit wont burn on every release.

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